Section: European Voice (EU)

Realism tinged with relief was the dominant mood among leaders of the European Union today as they began to absorb the details of an agreement wrung out of the Russian and Ukrainian presidents overnight by the leaders of France and Germany. The mood was set by Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, as she headed into the EU summit in Brussels...

Greece’s hated bailout memorandum and the ‘troika’ of officials that enforced it “no longer exist”, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s new prime minister, declared tonight (13 February) following his first European Council. Yet in the margins of the meeting he authorised Greece’s experts to enter into technical discussions with...

EU leaders meeting in Brussels today (12 February) called for increased use of existing cross-border co-operation tools to track terrorist fighters returning from fighting in Syria. But they stopped short of calling for a immediate revision of the EU’s Schengen Border Code. Though today’s informal summit was originally supposed to...

European leaders are meeting in Brussels today (12 February) to try to hash out solutions to a triumvirate of problems plaguing the European Union – terrorism, the spectre of Greece leaving the eurozone and the deteriorating situation in Greece. Scroll down for live updates and video from the summit. Last night a meeting of eurozone finance...

Something must be done. This is something. So let’s do it. That (put crudely) is the way Western foreign policy thinking works when confronted with a tough problem. Two ‘somethings’ were under discussion here at the Munich Security Conference: the Franco-German diplomatic initiative to end the war in Ukraine, and the American idea of...

The leaders of France and Germany will take centre stage today when European leaders turn to the conflict in eastern Ukraine at their informal summit in Brussels. As European Voice went to print, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s François Hollande were still holding crisis talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and...

The European Union is currently engaged in two games of bluff, each of them of enormous importance to the future development of Europe. The smaller contest is between the newly-elected government of Greece and the other countries of the eurozone, over whether or not the bail-out provided by international lenders should be prolonged, and on what...

The crisis in Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s dangerous dependence on Russian gas and the lack of an interconnected energy market. Yet despite the increasing urgency of Europe’s energy predicament, it appears that the European Commission will put off major decisions when it adopts a much-awaited strategy paper on energy union on 25...

A plan to obtain member state endorsement of the Commission’s intention to withdraw the ‘circular economy’ proposal to reduce waste landfill was dealt an unexpected blow today (10 February) by Europe ministers meeting in Brussels. The Commission planned to ask ministers meeting at the general affairs council today whether they had a...

Boiko Borisov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, pushed the European Commission and member states to select Bulgaria as the site of a new ‘gas hub’ that will bring new sources of energy to Europe, during a high-level energy summit in Sofia today (9 February). Borisov suggested the idea during a visit to the European Commission last month, as...